PC-BSD is a new FreeBSD 5.3 distribution, with a graphical installer and KDE 3.4 as its desktop. A new beta version was just released, and though I can't say I have much experience with FreeBSD, or any *BSD for that matter, I was curious enough to try it. And I'm glad I did. From a desktop user's point of view, completely oblivious to the many virtues and sound foundation of all things BSD, all I really ever wanted was an OS that is solid, easy to install and, well ... fun to work with.

This is a huge misconception - FreeBSD has an excellent binary package management system. You can think of ports as a bonus! pkg_add -r openoffice is equivalent to apt get install openoffice! The FreeBSD package building cluster regurarly build packages out of ports - and the above command will install them from the package repository. In fact, what makes FreeBSD really amazing is the easyness by which you can create binary packages. If you have the portinstall/portupgrade tools, installing a package is like this:
portinstall mplayer

Now if you want a binary package built after install, you do this:

portinstall -p mplayer

If you want the package manager to look for binary packages and build from source only if there is none available, you:

portinstall -P mplayer

If you want binary updates exclusively, you:

portinstall -PP mplayer.

You can even create a binary package from a port you installed (it doesn't metter if you built it from ports or installed from a binary originally): pkg_create -b <package_name> will create a binary package. That binary package will have all the info a normal .deb or .rpm package does. It has info about the dependencies it needs to install before it is installed for instance. So if you move the binary to another computer, it will tell you what dependencies it needs if they are not available in the same directory it installs from. It may even try to fetch it automatically from the net (like normal pkg_add -r does).

Download a package that suits you, and as root in its
directory just type pkg_add openofficesomething. It will tell you if you miss something (that you can either build from ports or install via pkg_add!).